1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image collation device, which is applied, for example, as a fingerprint collation device. The device of the present invention involves the operation that a plurality of frames are specified for an inspection object, a plurality of linear images are cut from each frame, the coincidence between images in each frame is determined with reference to a plurality of cut linear images, this determination results are determined on an overall basis to finally determine the coincidence between the images, and thereby the image collation device can obtain the result of collation between images such as fingerprint image consistently.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, in the conventional fingerprint collation device using an image collation device of this sort, featured points such as a branch, point, and cut (referred to as featured point hereinafter) are extracted from a fingerprint image obtained by means of an image pick-up device, and fingerprint collation is performed with reference to these featured points.
In other words, in the conventional fingerprint collation device, a fingerprint to be collated is previously converted to database with reference to, for example, featured points and coordinate values. A fingerprint image to be subjected to fingerprint collation is subjected to image processing in order to extract featured points. Then, a database has an access to the extracted featured points and the fingerprint is collated based on the existence of corresponding featured points.
The conventional fingerprint collation is disadvantageous in that fingerprint collation takes a long time. If fingerprint collation is carried out consistently within a short time, the fingerprint collation device provides improved convenience for use, and such improvement is desirable.
To solve this problem, there may be one method that linear images are cut from a fingerprint image to be inspected, and the cut linear images are moved successively on a image to be determined, thereby comparison results are obtained. In this method, the degree of similarity can easily be detected, but there is a problem that no consistent collation result can easily be obtained.